What Is Stargate, OpenAI's $500 Billion Project To Make US A Global AI Leader

Sam Altman's OpenAI is working on a massive project called Stargate, which aims to make the US a global leader in AI. The company, along with Oracle and Microsoft, is investing $500 billion to build AI infrastructure in the country and aims to offer over 100,000 jobs to Americans immediately, according to a report in Forbes.

OpenAI has also collaborated with Crusoe Energy, which aims to provide sustainable energy solutions with cutting-edge technology. Founded by Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, the company has found a smart way to use waste gas from oil wells to make electricity. They will use this clean energy to help run the big computers needed for AI.

Companies usually burn natural gas when taken out of the ground, which often creates pollution. Instead, Crusoe Energy will capture the gas by running engines. 

Mr Lochmiller says it will be a "factory of factories," which means that the AI systems will create more advanced AIs in the future.

The project's flagship data centre will be built in Abilene, Texas, with plans to install 1 lakh Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2025. On most days, the hundreds of wind turbines in West Texas that are 300 feet tall will provide the majority of that power, generating significantly more electricity than the area requires. 

Earlier, Crusoe Energy used this electricity to mine Bitcoin.

Although the entire $500 billion investment has not yet been distributed, the first $100 billion is currently being used to build two data centres. OpenAI's AI models will be trained and operated with the assistance of these data centres.

The computing system will be built and operated by a collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia. The initial group of funders includes SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX and additional technology partners include Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Arm. 

The mega project becomes all the more important given the meteoric rise of Chinese AI DeepSeek, which challenges the dominance of OpenAI by offering models at a fraction of the cost and far less complication. In recent weeks, OpenAI has also responded to the growing competition with the launch of GPT-4o, which comes with an image-generation feature.

On Monday Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, announced that GPT-4.1 (and -mini and -nano) were now available in the API. These models are great at coding, instruction following, and long context (1 million tokens), he added.